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The Demon on His Shoulder

PEOPLES CHOICE Sean Avery has no shortage of fans at Madison Square Garden, where he was adored before leaving for Dallas in the off-season.Credit
Michael Nagle for The New York Times

IN the first period of the New York Rangers game Tuesday, Sean Avery, a left wing, repeatedly punched an opponent in the skull. An hour later, Mr. Avery stood in a locker room at Madison Square Garden discussing men’s fashion.

“I admire well-dressed men no matter where they are — a guy in a police uniform that has it pulled together nicely or a doctor in his scrubs,” he said, a nasty scratch bleeding on his chin. “I like that identity of having a presence. I think that’s what it is. It states your presence.”

Mr. Avery is an unusual presence himself. A charmer off the ice with a fashion sense even sharper, perhaps, than David Beckham’s, he worked as an intern at Vogue last summer, counts the designer Vera Wang and the actor Tim Robbins as friends — and has twice led the National Hockey League in penalty minutes.

He has a reputation as a talented player, but one despised by many others in the league. He has a dangerously unpredictable mouth — and impeccable taste in Dries Van Noten suits.

The N.H.L. suspended Mr. Avery in December for crudely insulting two rival players who were dating ex-girlfriends of his, one an actress, the other a supermodel. His own team, the Dallas Stars, refused to take him back. Earlier this month, he landed with the Rangers, the gang he had left before going to Dallas as a free agent.

Whether his act — on-ice and off — plays better now that he has returned to the lights of Manhattan depends on which Sean Avery emerges: the fashion-fascinated dandy who is wildly popular with fans and is a partner in a restaurant and bar set to open in TriBeCa; or the hothead who has often bitten the hand that pays his $4-million-a-year salary.

“It’s like that little devil on your shoulder,” Mr. Avery said Monday during an autograph signing event. “I have to keep him under control.”

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LEARNING CURVE Sean Avery, at the Perry Ellis show last September, has impressed people with his knowledge of the industry.Credit
Rob Loud/Getty Images for IMG

Note that he did not say he had to keep the devilcompletely in check. The demon in Sean Avery can be useful. Take his fight with Cal Clutterbuck of the Minnesota Wild on Tuesday. It earned each player a five-minute penalty, but Mr. Avery said later that he had planned the whole thing, calculating that he could give his team a spark by engaging in his first fight in front of the home crowd. The Rangers won the contest, 2 -1.

During his suspension, Mr. Avery checked himself into a residential program in Los Angeles for two weeks of anger management therapy. Friends say he emerged calmer and more focused.

“He does meditations,” said Lauryn Flynn, the head of V.I.P services for Burberry. “He has become a little more Zen in his thinking.”

Mr. Avery has a lot to overcome. During his career, he has called a Los Angeles Kings coach “a clown,” a broadcaster “an embarrassment” and an opposing player “an arrogant little midget.” In a 2007 Hockey News poll of N.H.L. players, he was voted “most hated.”

When he was traded by the Kings to the Rangers in 2007, New York seemed just what he had always needed: he thrived under the pressure of playing here. His brawling style fit the mood of New York hockey fans, and his fashion sense began attracting new ones.

“He’s knowledgeable,” said the designer Narciso Rodriguez, who met Mr. Avery last summer. “He follows fashion. He knows who the designers are, who are the good ones he likes.”

His interest in fashion, both men’s and women’s, appears to be genuine, not just a bid for attention or a way to meet models. He reads about fashion voraciously, said Ms. Flynn. “He’s read biographies of Lagerfeld, every possible thing you can get on Coco Chanel.”

At Vogue, Mr. Avery said, “I did everything from schlepping clothes back and forth from Steven Klein’s studio, to trying to get b-roll on a photo shoot in L.A., a little bit of everything.”

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IN THEIR LEAGUE Mr. Avery, who moves easily in fashions circles, with Kelly Klein at benefit event last May at Lincoln Center.Credit
Billy Farrell/Patrick McMullan

One summer evening, Ms. Flynn said she dropped in to Graydon Carter’s Waverly Inn in Greenwich Village and saw Mr. Avery. “He was there with André Leon Talley and Karl Lagerfeld,” she said. “It was one of the most surreal experiences.”

Mr. Avery says that one day he’d like to create a line of designer athletic wear.

“There’s a few that do it like Y-3 and obviously Stella McCartney,” he said, “but I think there’s maybe a gap in there I could get into.”

The fashion flock has returned the interest. “He’s made me a big fan of hockey now,” Mr. Rodriguez said.

At last Sunday’s game against the Ottawa Senators, Mr. Rodriguez was in the crowd to cheer Mr. Avery on, along with other of the player’s style-world pals, like Kirsten Dunst, the actress; Joanna Coles, the editor of Marie Claire magazine; and Matt Abramcyk, an owner of the Beatrice Inn.

That same freezing cold night, female fans were lined up for more than an hour after the game at the player exit of Madison Square Garden, waiting for Mr. Avery. “He’s the fire of the Rangers,” said Jessica Godfrey, 23, who was wearing a jersey with an Avery autograph at the nearby Blarney Rock bar.

Mr. Avery’s most notorious on-ice moment came during the Stanley Cup playoffs last spring, when he sought to distract the Devils goalie Martin Brodeur by standing with his back to the action and using his arms and stick to block the goalie’s view, aping every move Mr. Brodeur made. Hockey purists fumed. The next day the league banned such antics, a prohibition known informally as the Avery Rule.

Despite the controversies, Mr. Avery’s star seemed on the rise last year. Beau Flynn, a Hollywood producer (and Ms. Flynn’s brother), sold a movie idea to New Line Cinema focusing on Mr. Avery’s time at a fashion magazine. The working title: “Puckface.”

But Mr. Avery’s bankability took a hit last December, when, before a game with the Calgary Flames in Canada, he sought to stir the pot by alluding to a Flames defenseman who was dating a former girlfriend of his — the actress Elisha Cuthbert — as well as to a Kings player who was dating the model Rachel Hunter, whom Mr. Avery had also gone out with.

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TRAINING DAYS Mr. Avery, as a Vogue intern, makes a statement.

“I just want to comment on how it’s become like a common thing in the N.H.L. for guys to fall in love” with former girlfriends of his, he told reporters, using crude language to describe the women. The incident led to his six-game suspension.

Bob Williams, the chief executive of Burns Entertainment and Sports Marketing, said that if Mr. Avery really wants a career beyond hockey, in which he trades on his name, he needs to be careful. He is in danger of veering into Dennis Rodman territory, Mr. Williams said.

As the Rangers fight to get into the playoffs, they have been winning more often since Mr. Avery returned. When he arrived, one of the team leaders, goalie Henrik Lundqvist, pulled him aside. “I told him,” Mr. Lundqvist said, “ ‘You’re a great player, keep focused on the game.’ ”

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On Monday, as Mr. Avery was autographing pucks and photographs at a memorabilia shop on the Upper West Side, he said that he now does breathing exercises whenever he gets upset.

He showed off a tattoo he had gotten after his time at the Canyon, a rehabilitation center in Malibu, Calif. It is on the inside of his right arm, a quotation from a Radiohead song: “You used to be alright, what happened?”

“The way I think about it is, I used to be all right and now I am trying to be better than all right to people and to my teammates and to myself,” Mr. Avery said.

Born in Pickering, Ontario, Mr. Avery broke into the N.H.L. at 20 with the Detroit Red Wings. Shorter than many players, he adopted a rough persona on the ice. Over time, it grew into a monster. “I don’t think I really realized where it had gone,” he said, “until everything happened with the suspension and the time off.”

Though the Rangers have turned down many requests from the news media to interview Mr. Avery outside the locker room, insisting that he stay focused on the game, he has not sworn off his extracurricular interests.

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IN THE MIX Mr. Avery and Minnesotas Cal Clutterbuck try to settle some on-ice issues.Credit
Barton Silverman/The New York Times

He paid for a table at a fund-raiser for the Museum of Natural History on Thursday, inviting Vogue editors and assistants.

He has invested in a new restaurant and bar, Warren 77, with Mr. Abramcyk and Chris Miller, a former art dealer. Mr. Abramcyk, who played hockey as a teenager, said he met Mr. Avery at Smith & Mills, a night spot Mr. Abramcyk co-owns in TriBeCa. The two became friends, and Mr. Avery invited him to play hockey at a rink on the property of Mr. Robbins and Susan Sarandon in Pound Ridge, N.Y.

“Out of the blue,” Mr. Abramcyk said, “I was down and he was on top of me pushing his stick down on me like you see hockey players doing on TV.”

Mr. Avery was only pretending to be angry, Mr. Abramcyk said during a tour of their new spot, which will have a vintage sports theme, on Warren Street.

Originally, Mr. Avery had planned to invest in a different project with Mr. Abramcyk and his brother. The plans went awry, Mr. Abramcyk said, when Mr. Avery egged the two on when they got into a dispute about working on New Year’s eve.

The question is whether Mr. Avery can continue to keep his demons at bay as the Rangers’ season heats up. At the autograph signing on Monday, a woman presented a photo of Mr. Avery getting the best of Mr. Brodeur during an on-ice collision. “When are you going to start getting rough again?” the fan said. “You can’t be a good boy all the time. It’s part of your game.”

The next night he was pummeling Mr. Clutterbuck.

Later, in the locker room, he described the few seconds when both players had shed their helmets and gloves and were poised to exchange blows.

“It’s the most honest moment of clarity I have on any level of life, as funny as that sounds,” he said. “Before I went away and after I went away, it’s still the quietest time I ever have in my head — when I’m about to engage someone in that manner.”